or maybe it is, so many love poems keep appearing in the blogs. Love poems are some of the hardest poems to write, or so claimed W. H. Auden. Here are a few classics that have inspired poets and lovers over the years:
- The Passionate Shepherd to His Love by Christopher Marlowe
- The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd by Sir Walter Ralegh
- somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond by e. e. cummings
- To the March Wind by Chuck Guilford
- Let me not to the marriage of true minds by William Shakespeare
- The Definition of Love by Andrew Marvell
- What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why by Edna St. Vincent Millay
- The Buried Life by Matthew Arnold
- A Birthday by Christina Rossetti
- How Do I Love Thee? by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
- Wild Nights — Wild Nights! by Emily Dickinson
- When You Are Old by W. B. Yeats
- Credo by Matthew Roher
A few suggestions: use concrete, specific images to show your feelings; avoid sing-song "roses are red" type rhyming; try to say something fresh and new that gives readers a new insight — or even a laugh.
And check out the following topics:
Poem#15: Meditate
Pick a spot where you can write for a while without being disturbed. this could be a private spot where you are alone, or a public spot such as a coffee house or a park.
Begin by focusing on your immediate environment. Note the sights, sounds, smells all around you and start writing them down. As you do, let yourself get lost in your surroundings. You may want to to use apostrophe, or to shift perspectives.
After four or five minutes, turn your attention gradually inward to your experience of the scene—what it reminds you of or how it makes you feel, for instance. Don't try to control or direct this process, just tap into your internal language. And keep writing.
Read more ...A Poetry Writing Process
Everyone has a personal and unique way of writing. And even with the same poet, different poems follow different paths from inspiration to publication. Even so, it's possible to envision a general process that can help us see where we are at and where we are headed as we work on our poems.
The ideas in this section are intended to help you keep moving ahead with your writing.
Rhythm and Meter
These are similar but not identical concepts. Rhythm refers to the overall tempo, or pace, at which the poem unfolds, while meter refers to the measured beat established by patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables. Poets who write free verse, generally de-emphasize or ignore meter and focus instead on refining and tuning their natural speech rhythms to suit the poem's tone and content. Or as Ezra Pound put it, they "compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of the metronome."
Read more ...
